“Today most people’s first and only exposure to these communities is by way of the 1986 film The Mission, which is, oddly enough, a testimony to both of these prevailing biases. It is clear that the makers of the film intended to defend and give tribute to this fabled civilization that arose in the South American jungles, which they understood as a
Jesuit accomplishment among an otherwise passive native population. On another level though, some post-colonial writers claim this film is a self-parody of Western colonial attitudes toward native peoples, whose lives and deaths are served up as part of the scenery on which the European characters play out their melodramas—in much the same way that the pagan gods often worked out their mythical interactions
amidst the mundane backdrop of human existence (Lora, n.d.).”